


She cut through worlds and joined them so that both became bigger

by Miss_M



Category: Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delany
Genre: 5+1 Things, Culture Shock, Gen, Language, Language Barrier, Letters, Post-Canon, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat, cold war metaphors, mention of a death in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 11:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27969980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: After the war, Rydra visits the Invader part of the galaxy as a cultural ambassador.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	She cut through worlds and joined them so that both became bigger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FireBatVillain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireBatVillain/gifts).



> I own nothing.

_1\. Communication was working that night?_

“…Transfer to the Federation ship at Nueva-nueva York happened without a hitch. There was some quibbling about why I needed my entire crew with me, including the discorporate (spies!) and the kids (hooligans!), but I assured them I was very spoiled and required the full complement to accompany me, and anyway we won’t be armed with anything but our wits. They drew the line at allowing our discorporate into Federation space – my head was ringing with unkind thoughts in Basque until we switched ships – but at least I was able to bring everyone else.

“Our hosts are escorting us down the spiral arm on a freighter called the _Quetzal_. Our berths are in the luxury part of the passenger section. The kids are complaining that they feel cramped – they’re scared they might break something and start the war off again. It’s strange being in the lap of luxury yet feeling constantly a little on edge. No one thinks anything bad will happen, not really, but we were all born in wartime, new synapses haven’t formed yet.

“It’s also strange having to remind myself to say, think, write ‘Federation’ instead of ‘Invaders.’ Calling someone by their proper name is the first cornerstone of diplomacy and civilization. Mocky told me that.

“It’s still strange.

“I miss you…”

Rydra’s stylus hovered above the message tissue. She drew two quick strokes to underline two words, flourish translated physically into emphasis:

“I miss you. General Forester was right to not let you come with us – I am prepared to be diplomatic, not to trust the Federation if such a prize were dangled before them – but I miss you so much. Nyles. Butcher. Nyles. I write your names as the cornerstone on which I can build this edifice of peace and reconciliation the Alliance sent me to, ah, erect. With all my love, Rydra”

She sealed the edge of the message tissue and dropped it into the slot in the console in front of her seat by the view-screen. Her love letter would be examined for codes, hidden messages, pure informational content before being transmitted across the Axis, into Alliance space. Despite her commitment to politeness, it amused Rydra to think of her hosts’ reaction to its contents: their secret weapon addressed as a cherished lover, with a sex joke thrown in for good measure.

Past the jump, her crew gathered around her to watch the satellites and stellarcenters and planetoids clustered thickly like carbuncles as their freighter approached the Federation’s capital at Tian Wang. Over the intercom, a finely modulated voice speaking English with a strong New Slavonic accent listed the names as the objects slipped past, for the formerly-inimical passengers’ edification:

“Novaya Moskva, Montreal, Tlaloc, Little Yucatan, Greater Yucatan, The Trench, Midgard…”

“Bollocks,” Calli muttered, leaning over Rydra’s left shoulder to peer at the view-screen.

_2\. Compatibility factors for communication_

“Slug, is there something wrong with the kids?” Rydra asked, peering at Diavalo and Carlos and Flop over the buffet table. The boys were doing a terrible job of suppressing their guffaws, politeness and diplomacy not being prominent adolescent features.

“It is not possible they’re not hungry,” Rydra said. “Are they sick?”

She didn’t like how her mind went immediately to betrayal, sabotage, poisons administered through the ventilation system in their guest quarters at the Duchess Singh’s palace.

Slug kept piling fruit onto his plate: mangoes, passion fruit, raspberries as big as Rydra’s thumb… He grabbed a small bunch of bananas as well.

“Nah, they’ll start eating in a minute. They’re just amused that the Inv…” He caught sight of Rydra’s arched eyebrow and corrected himself: “… that our hosts are so very proud of their hydroponic installations. Diavalo is used to pulling all this from his carbo-synth at home. They’re wondering where the hot dogs and beans on toast are.”

“Maybe that’s what the Transport class eats here on Tian Wang, and the aristocracy have adopted an animal protein-free diet as a status symbol or a fad,” Rydra said dryly. “We don’t know enough yet. I suggest you explain to the kids that the essence of relativism is the suspension of judgment. From suspension of judgment comes suspension of disbelief.”

Slug eyeballed half a papaya on a silver platter on the table and the pyramid of fruit on his plate. “All due respect, Captain, I’ll tell them to stuff their traps with what’s offered and enjoy it.”

Rydra laughed. “You’re a poet yourself!”

Slug grinned around a mouthful of orange and purple fruit: “Added benefit, they won’t be able to say anything that’ll get us all tossed out of the nearest ejection hatch without a spacesuit.”

_3\. The symbolic process_

Rydra’s books had been published in the Federation in the months since what the Alliance called its victory and the Federation insisted was just an armistice and a prelude to peace negotiations. Bootleg copies had floated around from hand to hand before, mimeographed sheaves of blurry words in both the original and several different translations, oddly selected concatenations of her poems made by others without a care or a thought to spare for what she had desired for her own books.

It occurred to Rydra that this was the purest form of reader encounter she might ever expect to have. 

Her visit to the Federation, in her role as unofficial cultural ambassador on a good-will tour and equally unofficial decoder of Babel-17 who should charm and terrify every Federation representative who met her – their smiles when they shook her hand were sharp, the skin around their eyes grew tight – included several poetry readings. In the interests of studied even-handedness bordering on passive-aggression, she always read in English first, and then her official translator (likewise not selected by Rydra, for she had not been consulted) delivered her words in New Slavonic, so that the audience benefitted both from Rydra’s presence and voice and from understanding what the poems were actually about.

Rydra found flinging herself against the wall of incomprehension from an audience that didn’t understand a word of what she said to be exhausting. Their comingled curiosity, hostility, and haughtiness toward her person merely gnawed at her with blunt, herbivorous teeth. By the time she could sit down on the side of the stage and let her translator take her place at the mike, she was happy to just let the language wash over her. She’d taken a hypno-course in Elementary New Slavonic during the voyage, which gave her enough understanding of the grammar and syntax to appreciate the language’s complex modulations, even as the deeper shades of meaning and word choice mostly continued to elude her. It was restful and stimulating at the same time.

In English, she’d read:

_Young man, she’ll gnaw out your tongue_

_Lady, he will steal your hands..._

But she heard in another’s voice:

_Young-man-is-one-word in the vocative case, she’ll outbite (or possibly offchew) your tongue-which-is-also-the-word-for-language in the accusative_

_Lady (used for a highborn woman but never in the sense of a cab driver yelling “hey, lady, watch it!”), lady being hailed in the vocative, he will steal your hands-which-can-also-be-arms in the accusative…_

She had and had not written that, her self felt both affirmed and imperiled, sandy and solid. The cases fell on her like rain. The gendering of every noun – a man, a woman, a cat, a table, a stasis jump – grew around her like a thick jungle of glossy leaves. The regular and irregular plurals and the vestigial dual spun around her, dizzying.

Eyes closed, Rydra listened to the translator’s deep, melodious voice, and smiled.

_4\. The “weapon” is the knowledge of what to do with what you have_

“So, the boys from the _Quetzal_ ’s Repair crew cheat?” Rydra summed up.

“Yes!” Lizzy affirmed, red-cheeked with indignation. “No! I wouldn’t exactly call it cheating.”

“What would you call it?”

Rydra said it kindly, and Lizzy puffed herself up in preemptive defensiveness before her cerebrum processed Rydra’s tone and the absence of the challenging _comma_ _then_ at the end. The girl subsided and thought about her answer.

“Paul, Pavel, their best player, he has this move…”

Lizzy tried to demonstrate for Rydra’s benefit, but her thumb kept slipping and the marble kept falling to the floor and rolling away, directionless.

“It’s not cheating, not really, but he’s got most of my marbles and he keeps taunting me that he’ll get them all before the end of our stay. It wouldn’t be half so annoying if he didn’t also pretend he doesn’t speak any English,” Lizzy concluded glumly.

Rydra thought about explaining the concept of psychological warfare to Lizzy. She weighed the benefits of reverse psychology. She was fairly certain Pavel was the tall, blue-eyed crewmember who made many of his own as well as Rydra’s young crew blush, not just Lizzy. She considered and immediately discarded pointing this out.

She settled on: “You are the best marble player in Alliance space, Lizzy. I have every confidence that you’ll figure out the right moves and the strategy to win back your marbles and all of his.”

Lizzy’s unhappy blush faded to a pleased pink, her eyes shone, and her spine straightened.

_5\. The other self_

With the aid of Brass and the kids distracting her Federation minders, Rydra managed to slip out of her quarters and go wandering the streets of Tian Wang like she was an average citizen, concealed behind a wide-brimmed hat and some cheap sunglasses.

She found Federation Square to be a near twin to Alliance Plaza, right down to the shade of marble in which it was paved, the arched, soaring abstract sculpture topping the fountain in its center, and the gaggles of well-dressed tourists taking pictures and the surly but equally well-dressed kids lounging by the fountain, refusing to move from the photographs and eyeing the tourists.

One boy among them sat alone, hunched and coiled, a red rose blooming on his bare shoulder.

He looked up from under a shock of fair hair when Rydra stopped in front of him, blocking the sun with her wide hat. “Captain?”  
  
“You needed to be alone in the crowd too, huh?”

Ron squinted up at her. “I climbed down the ivy that grows under our bedroom window while Calli flirted with one of our guards and Mollya challenged the other one to a wrestling match.”

Rydra sat down beside him. “I think they like to be called minders, not guards. I escaped through one of the servants’ entrances. Brass mustered the kids for a game of football in the hallway outside my room. I’m pretty sure they used my guards as goalposts.”

Ron slipped her a crooked smile. He hugged his knees, his rose opening fragrant petals in the strong sunshine.

Rydra gestured at the square, the milling people, the rainbow jets of sun-struck water. “What do you think?”

Ron shrugged. “It all looks pretty similar to Earth. I didn’t expect that.”

“No, neither did I.”

Most everything was a carbon copy or a coin-flip of how it was done on the Alliance side, except then there would be a detail which jarred everything off balance, and of course the languages and the letters and logographs on books and product packaging and street signs kept Rydra feeling askew, like she was trying to walk on one broken heel. She had to keep reminding herself that while the Federation had killed her parents and nearly killed her with one of their embargoes, it likely wasn’t these exact people who’d done that, the people snapping holiday pictures and posing picturesquely with their friends. Scanning their faces, Rydra wondered about some of the older ones, the ones with what looked like military bearing, the haughty patrician ones who reminded her unpleasantly of the late Baron Ver Dorco…

She shook off her paranoia. “They gave you and Mollya and Calli a room with a huge bed and three sinks in the ensuite. That’s different.”

“Guess so. Our tour guide told me she’s tripled too, like it’s nothing. Don’t nobody call us perverts here.”

Rydra waited. “You don’t sound very happy about it,” she said when she saw from the angle of Ron’s jaw that he would say no more unprompted.

Ron’s eyes were round and sad and angry. “They grow their kids in biotanks, but then they use pregnant women as cruiser pilots. I don’t get it.”

“Pregnant women have faster reflexes,” Rydra said, but the scene in _Tarik_ ’s loading dock unspooled again before her mind’s eye: the woman waddle-running for cover, slumping over after Butcher had shot her, and her, Rydra’s, inability to articulate her horror, her sorrow…

“I get _that_ ,” Ron said. “I just don’t understand how they can do it like that.”

Rydra allowed him the silent space in which to let his emotions roll off him in waves. “I think whatever we consider trivial in our own lives becomes a burr when someone does it differently. The trivial is all-important, till habit or desensitization make it trivial again.”

She touched Ron’s arm, the corded muscle under the white skin turning pink in the sun. “You don’t have to approve of it all, or at all,” she said kindly.

_+1. Congruent synapses quivered sympathetically_

“Sometimes,” Rydra wrote to Nyles and Mocky before the kids piled into her guest quarters to fetch her for the outing she’d promised her crew, “sometimes the brain and the heart just need the comfort of the familiar.”

“Now this is my kind of ‘lace!” Brass exclaimed as he loped down the stairs to the main floor of the crowded bar.

The patrons inclined more toward aesthetic scarring than cosmetisurgery, but they were just as rough and nude and hungry for entertainment as those to be found in any Transport Town bar on Earth or Alleppo or Persephone. The drinks glowed in electric shades, poison shades, “make your dreams come true and make you wish you were dead before your hangover hits” shades, and instead of a spherical arena, suspended above the bar area was a large, floating cage with thick metal bars. A man with copper-colored hair, his milk-pale skin covered in thick swirls of raised scarring, red spirals snaking across his shoulders and down his spine, threw another man with the furry shoulders and haunches of a black bear across the cage. The bear hit the metal with a satisfying, reverberating clang, grabbed a metal bar with his clawed hand, and swung up and around to meet the scarified redhead in midair.

“Bear’s no good,” Brass said, his head tipped back to watch. “Even if he wins, he’ll be all bruised up, no good to fly. Trick seems to be to avoid hitting the metal bars.”

Calli clapped him on the shoulder. “You gonna try your luck? Show ‘em how it’s done?”

Brass turned uncharacteristically shy, all ten feet of him, while the kids set up a small but dedicated chant of “Brass! Brass! Brass! Brass!”, keeping the beat with their tankards on the long bar’s zinc surface. Slug offered Mollya a bet on the pair in the cage, but she declined when the odds were so clearly in the redhead’s favor by dint of his opponent’s lack of skill.

“I already got a job,” Brass protested. “Ca’tain, tell ‘em!”

The others’ encouragement and goading and the tattoo of their tankards on the bar grew even more cacophonous in reply.

Ron got bored of the uneven match overhead and glanced over his crewmates talking, drinking, arm-wrestling, a few of the kids insult-flirting with a Federation crew trying to get the bartenders’ attention. They were an Alliance island among the Federation Transport people blowing off steam all around them, the Slavonic and Mandarin and Maori intonations if not the unfamiliar words making clear that the regulars too expected better sport from their pilots and maintained the same standards of work and play as on the other side of the Axis.

Rydra perched on a barstool next to Ron. “Nice place,” he shouted over the din of the bar, and she smiled and clinked her glass of sunset-purple something-or-other against his drinking horn.


End file.
